US bombing in northern Pakistan: an act of imperialist recklessness

Under international law, the strike was an act of war. The Pakistani government of President Pervez Musharraf has collaborated with the US takeover of Afghanistan and its broader international aggression, but it has never formally granted the US military the right to cross the border and carry out operations on Pakistani soil or airspace. It is unclear whether the Pakistani government and military had pre-knowledge of the attack. But in the face of public outrage it has been compelled to issue a protest to the US ambassador and deplore the bombing of Damadola as “highly condemnable”.

Not only was the attack a violation of Pakistani national sovereignty, the intended target—the senior Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri—was not even in the village. Haroon Rashid, the local member of the Pakistani National Assembly, told Afghan Islamic Press: “I know all the 18 people who were killed. There was neither al-Zawahiri nor any other Arab among them. Rather they were all poor people of the area.” A Pakistani military intelligence officer told Al Jazeerah: “Their [the US military] information was wrong, and our investigations conclude that they acted on false information.”

To this point, the Bush administration has not issued a statement on the attack, despite the fact that innocent civilians were slaughtered and a formal protest issued by the Musharraf regime. Various unnamed US officials, however, have told the press that American intelligence agencies believed that al-Zawahari was sleeping in one of the three homes that were reduced to rubble. The New York Times reported that the attack was thought to have been carried out by CIA-operated unmanned Predator drone aircraft, which flew into Pakistani territory from Afghanistan.

The air strike was the second US intrusion into the country within one week. On January 7, at least eight people were killed in an attack by US helicopters on a house in North Waziristan, another mountainous border region some 300 kilometres to the south of Damadola.

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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jan2006/paki-j16.shtml